It’s April 12th, 2015. Week fourteen of writing 1,000 words per day of fiction.

Most of my writing this past week has been in what are called Sprints, a method that one of my writing cohorts swears by, and it’s hard to argue with her results. The concept of a sprint is to write with abandon for 10 solid minutes, then stop. You take a 10 minute break where you do whatever the hell you want, and then you write for another 10 solid minutes. This continues for as long as you can write on a given day.

Most of the time I write 300 to 400 words in a 10 minute sprint. Because I’m focused in smaller bursts, these words are also focused. Maybe they’re not elegant, but they’re usable. They’re viable. I can make them work for me. Sprints are a great tool if you can adhere to them and protect your 10 minute writes.

Let’s get on with it, eh?

Days 95 through 101 have been successes, with a minimum of 1,000 words per day written. 

Stats for Days 95 to 101:

Day 95 – 1061 words
Day 96 – 1047 words
Day 97 – 1050 words
Day 98 – 1186 words
Day 99 – 1078 words
Day 100 – 1020 words
Day 101 – 1418 words

Total count for the year thus far is 132,618 words. Average daily word count is 1,313 words. Gridfall is at 125,157 words. Based on my projections for the story, it is 62.5% finished.

Also of note here: 100 days! I have written 1,000 words every single day for a solid 100 days. If you’d asked me at the start of all this how far into it before I missed a day, I’d have probably told you within a month. But here I am, over three solid months in, and still going strong. Maybe I won’t make the entire year (I still have 265 days to go), but 100 days in a row is something, all right.

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So I’m talking about the round robin writing game I’m participating in, and last week it was for Captain/Planet, a grimdark fanfic of everyone’s favorite eco-terrorists. This week I’m talking about the final story in the round robin writing game, The Magician, The Hanged Man, and The Fool.

What is this story? It’s a strange one, to be sure, but still my favorite among the whole bunch. It started as a noir tale with a detective agency, a dame in distress, and a hint of something possibly supernatural. The detective at the agency is a woman, she’s kind of a drunk, and she’s not entirely upright.

Detective Vivian Leterra is asked to go into the Netherworld to retrieve the titular Magician, Hanged Man, and Fool. What those things are, and what the Netherworld is, were unspecified. They evolved as the story went on. Instead of being a standard noir fare, with 50s lingo and technology, it went darker. The world has a neo-noir, pseudo-futuristic feel to it. Instead of the Netherworld just being a bar somewhere, or an occultist den, it’s a place possibly out of time or dimension. Going through sparks memories one would rather snuff out. Going through is a trial in itself. The place does not obey the laws of physics as we know them. Light and darkness are constructs that mean less in the Netherworld.

Person, place, identity. These things are a little more fluid, a little more open to interpretation. Vivian doesn’t want to go back in, but she has debts and bad memories and both need dealt with.

It’s a story of visual metaphor, of wiggy symbolism, of interesting dynamics.

It is almost completely focused on female characters at this point.

It’s such a strange world and concept and I love every minute of it. I can’t wait to write for it again.

That’s the last story I can talk about. I don’t know what I’ll throw out next week, maybe a discussion of the next project I want to tackle, after the writing game, after Gridfall? Maybe. We’ll see.

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And remember, writing is a skill. So write the hell on, writers.